Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2010; figures such as InfoJobs’ sale price and profits, Softonic’s 2,300,000 daily downloads and the average 300% revaluation of 50 dot-coms are from that time.
Most people think that everything on the internet has already been invented. Yet every year new websites are born that end up becoming million-dollar businesses. As we all know, the key to success in any internet business is to reach millions of users. If you manage that, 70% of your success is already assured. That, however, is the hardest part. Even so, Antonio González-Barros, the creator of Infojobs.net and Softonic.com, believes the success of his 50 dot-coms can still be applied to other market niches.
In an interview with the magazine Emprendedores, Antonio González-Barros said that he sold InfoJobs for 100 times the capital invested, and the capital invested was €500,000, so you can get an idea. He sold InfoJobs because it was making him only €1,000,000 a year in profit, and he decided that other people would know how to get more out of it.
On his site Softonic.com, more than 2,300,000 programs are downloaded every day, so you can imagine how many visits the site gets. We won’t name the rest of his 50 million-making websites, but he can boast that each of them has increased in value by more than 300% on average.
Antonio González-Barros’s ideas for internet entrepreneurs
When putting together a business project on the internet, Antonio recommends following these basic rules, which are no doubt built into his own projects.
1. Self-feeding
Antonio believes that the content should, wherever possible, be provided by the users. That saves labour and in-house publishing. Example: InfoJobs. A company posts a job offer and a candidate fills in their CV, so all the work is done by a user. An even simpler example is Facebook: we are the ones who create the content of a social network.
2. Motivate the internet user
The content has to interest users to the point where, at some stage, they don’t mind paying a fee for a service, filling in a form or visiting constantly. Another example: online film download sites. Once users try the service, they visit it constantly, and there comes a point when they consider paying a fee to remove the limits.
3. Scalable
The more users, the better, so we need a subject or service that attracts users from other countries, and if you can offer it in several languages, so much the better. Examples: Twitter, Facebook.
4. Make it viral
In short, it should spread by word of mouth. It has to offer content or a service that any user would recommend to the people they know. That way, you’ll gain visits over time.
5. Innovative
This is the hardest part, because giving users something that doesn’t yet exist online is very complicated, but mind you, not impossible. I’m sure that within a month we’ll hear about the great success of another internet business. Examples: Ebay.com and youtube.com. When eBay and YouTube came out, they were pioneers in offering a service. Competitors appeared later; even Google itself tried to compete with YouTube, and when it didn’t succeed, it ended up buying it.
These are the keys to building a profitable business on the internet. As for the advantages of an online business, we’ll mention the fundamental one: you don’t need as much investment as in an offline business, and costs come gradually as your profits grow. If an online business isn’t going well, you simply drop it without owing anything to anyone.
Another factor to bear in mind is that, just as with a high-street business or company, you need to surround yourself with capable people. In the words of Antonio González-Barros:
An ordinary project with someone outstanding goes well, but an outstanding project with someone mediocre will go badly.
We’d like to congratulate Mr González-Barros on his vision and success in online business and wish him the best of luck with his next projects, as I know this is only the beginning for this admirable man.
In a later article we’ll deal with a subject nobody talks about when it comes to setting up any online project: if something doesn’t go well, that will be your only problem, but if something is wildly successful, you’ll have a great many problems unless you’ve taken certain measures before you start.
Further reading
- The mindset of an entrepreneur
- Success and failure: two things we need to learn
- You can be a successful business owner
- 10 business ideas with no investment
- How to find business ideas
Featured image: Wilhelm Lappe, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
